Chapter One
The Midlands, 1817
Lucy knew theheir would come eventually. The old earl’s bastard owned Willowbrook now and would take it from her someday. Not today. Today a man with carroty-colored hair stood in front of the manor and shouted at her housekeeper.Another damned imposter.
Coming up from the fields, she pushed aside fears for her future and studied the miscreant attempting to bamboozle her. This wasn’t the one. She’d been told the heir had the look of a Caulfield, and Caulfields ran to dark auburn.
Scurrying behind the lilac bushes toward the back of the manor, she meant to retrieve her musket and confront him on the steps, but a loud yelp brought her to an abrupt stop. Another screech put a grin on her face. Agnes had the matter well in hand. Lucy trotted along the warm stone walls toward the front to watch her housekeeper whack the intruder with a broom.
“I told you to be gone.”
The man tried to fend off the barrage, waving hands over his head. “But I demand—”
Agnes didn’t pause her attack, striking at the man while he danced to avoid the broom, sputtering about his rights.
“Demand nothin’, you cur,” Agnes shouted. “Take it up with Spangler in Nottingham if you have aught to prove what ya say. Don’t come round here bothering Miss Whitaker with yer nonsense.”
The man slunk back a distance of ten or more feet, out of Agnes’s reach, whining, “But the earl…”
“The earl nothin’!” Agnes roared back.
Lucy hurried up the steps to stand at her housekeeper’s side. “If you actually spoke to the Earl of Clarion, he would have known you for the lying weasel you are and shown you the door,” she said.My brother-in-law may be distracted, but he’s no fool.“I suggest you crawl back into the hole you crawled out of before I add a sharper weapon to this good wife’s broom.”
“You can’t threaten me,” he called, backing away. “I’ll be back. I’m the true heir. I was going to let you stay on, but I’ll bring the magistrate to toss you out on the street for taking a man’s place.”
Lucy turned to Agnes. “Kindly keep this man inhisplace while I fetch the musket,” she said, enunciating each word.
“Be right quick. This one deserves a few holes in his worthless hide,” the older woman replied, broom held high, never taking her eyes from the intruder.
He took off then, running for his horse, a sad specimen with a sagging back, a mount so pathetic Lucy knew he didn’t hire it at the livery in Ashmead. Ellis Corbin wouldn’t have such an animal in his care, no matter how bad business had gotten.
“True heir, my arse,” Agnes muttered, forcing Lucy to smile. What her housekeeper lacked in refinement, she more than made up in loyalty.
“At least this one actually had red hair,” Lucy replied. Some of the others sported garish dyed locks. “No imposter is going to take my land, not as long as the two of us can make a stand.”
The women went through the door to find Cilla, their maid of all work, staring wide-eyed at the rapidly disappearing intruder. “Do you think he really spoke to the earl?” she whispered.
“Don’t be a ninny.” Agnes didn’t suffer fools.
Cilla paid her no mind. “That ’un said he’d be back ’n put us out, Miss Whitaker. What’f Spangler—him what is the earl’s man—believes him? Do you think he’s the real one? The one what’s coming?”
“That one? No. He hasn’t the look, and he isn’t bright enough.”At least I hope not. Lucy kept her fears to herself. It had been more than three years since the will was read, and the owner had yet to turn up. On good days, she believed he never would, that she would be left in peace to care for Willowbrook and its tenants. Other days, like this one…
“You be about cleaning the hearths in the bedrooms, Missy,” Agnes ordered Cilla, “And stop your fussing about things above your station.” She turned a worried face to Lucy. “Today makes two this month. They’re coming faster,” she said.
There had been an imposter the year the will was read, trying to claim he was the missing heir, easily disproved. Another turned up months later with a pock-marked face he claimed altered his appearance. That fool, so small in stature he didn’t even come up to Lucy’s shoulder, had also been put to route. The owner, she’d been told, would be a big man.
She let out her breath and sighed deeply. “Sooner or later, an interloper will come whoisthe actual heir. What will we do then, Agnes?”
A few hours later, Lucy tapped one finger on the desk and added the column of figures in her head a second time.Correct! A tidy ledger always gave her satisfaction. She turned from the household accounts to the first of the tenant pages with a frown and began to enter the few transactions that month. She had enough put by to see to Philpot’s roof, she thought with satisfaction.
“Oh, Miss!” The door slammed against the wall, and Cilla bobbed in on a wave of nerves.
“I hope this is life or death Cilla because you’ve been told never to—”
“Oh, it is, Miss. There’s another one, and Agnes is in the attics.”
“Another what?”
